


If the Bough Breaks (Someone Will Catch You)

by Meatball42



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bonding, Canon Compliant, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Podfic Available, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-03-20 00:03:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18981088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: “The blue chick, she’s a friend of yours, right?”Jim nods. It’s more or less accurate.“She headed out back a while ago. Sounds like she could use a friend right now.”





	If the Bough Breaks (Someone Will Catch You)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/gifts).



> The extremely gifted sophinisba created a podfic for this which can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169457) and at the bottom of this page. If you like podfics at all I recommend listening to that rather than reading the fic, because her work elevates this story beyond the words on the page. I'm in love with it, in case you can't tell <3

After the funeral ends, most of the crowd sticks around for a while. Some of them—Hill, Ross, Danvers and Fury—have to leave immediately. The rest mingle inside the house or outside in the sunlight.

Jim sits on a metal and woven bamboo chair at the firepit, near Parker and Keener. From this seat, he can watch Pepper and Steve, talking out on the dock, and Morgan and Happy up on the porch. The sun is warm, but he doesn't really feel like appreciating it. 

The boys are pretty quiet, but before too long they start talking about the different projects they'd worked on with Tony. The kid from Tennessee lived through the past five years, and has more to say. The younger one—five years younger than he should be—lets out a few tears, but smiles as he listens.

Jim would like to close his eyes. He has his own remembrancing to do, and no one to do it with. No one who would both understand, and wouldn't be hurt more for bearing Jim's pain. Sleeping, here in the quiet woods, with people who loved Tony all around him, that would be a start.

But instead, he watches over Pepper and Morgan, and the rest of them. 

 

~ ~ ~

 

After an hour, people are leaving.

Jim sees them to their cars. He's certainly staying, at least for a few days. He manages a smile for Okoye, promises Hope he'll speak to her next week. May Parker and Laura Barton get hugs and kisses on the cheek.

Wanda does, too. Jim remembers the days they spent as teammates, before that ended. It's another mostly-healed bruise on a body beaten down with grief.

Barnes is leaving with Sam and Wanda. He stares out at the woods for a minute, then leans in and says something to Sam before getting in their car. Sam looks in the same direction, then comes over to Jim.

“The blue chick, she’s a friend of yours, right?”

Jim nods. It’s more or less accurate.

“She headed out back a while ago. Sounds like she could use a friend right now.”

Sam claps him on the shoulder when they hug. Jim has missed him, and holds him for another second before saying goodbye.

 

~ ~ ~

 

Jim finds Nebula a good mile away from the cabin. She’s kicking what looks like a newly felled tree, ferocious and out-of-control. Then again, a lot of Nebula’s fighting looks out-of-control. That’s really just her way of life.

The sounds she’s making, though. They’re vicious and wrecked, half rage and half pain. It sounds a lot like what Jim has been carefully keeping inside, because he’s got Pepper and Morgan and what’s left of his team to watch out for.

Jim breathes in and summons up a few dregs of energy from somewhere, because he's just realized there's yet another person he's decided to care for.

“Hey, space girl.”

She whips around and stares at him like she wants to put a knife in him.

Chest heaving, she says, in her flat voice, “What.”

He points a few yards behind her, to where a small fire is starting from all the violently cracked wood.

“We gotta put that out. Can’t have a wildfire come through here.”

Nebula stares at the smoldering bits and first licks of flame and strides over to it. In an instant, she undoes her vest and starts using it to suppress the fire.

Graceful lines and panels in silver and gold and purple cover her body. For a second, Jim thinks she’s wearing a suit like War Machine, and then he remembers her hand on Morag, and a chill goes through his whole body.

He looks away before she finishes putting out the fire, but the metal in his spine and around his hips throbs in sympathetic pain.

Nebula sits down on the fallen tree. She goes very still, staring at the ground.

Jim picks his way over fractured sticks and torn-off branches until he can sit on the tree beside her. It’s a young elm tree, probably only a few decades old. It’s firm and dry. Jim thinks that Nebula must have put a lot of effort into bringing it down.

He knows she has enough anger to get out, to make this seem like nothing.

“Every time I think I don’t have anything more to lose… more is taken away.”

Jim closes his eyes again the bright forest. He knows just how she feels.

“My sister… she left.”

“I noticed.”

Nebula twitches. Jim can feel it through the body of the tree.

“For years. She tried to befriend me. I never. Wanted that. But now, now that I have changed. She doesn’t want me anymore.”

Jim rubs his face. “Hey. We’re talking about the old version of Gamora, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then she just got away from Thanos herself. Maybe it’s not that she doesn’t want you, but she just has to go away for awhile.”

Nebula growls. “Why would she have to go away? I am here!”

Her fist impacts the tree under them, making it shudder.

“People need time to get used to it when circumstances change suddenly. And losing your dad, your whole world changing? That’s a lot to deal with.”

“What is there to deal with! Thanos is dead! I am not! She should choose me!”

Her voice cracks and she pitches forward. Jim reaches to catch her if she falls, but instead he finds a knife at his throat.

“What are you doing?” she shouts.

“It’s a hug!” Jim insists. “You got hugs in space?”

Nebula’s large, watery black eyes blink twice. The knife lowers slowly. “We… do.”

“You don’t sound too sure.” Jim lets his arms fall as his pulse pounds in his chest.

“We have hugs in space,” Nebula says firmly.

Jim rolls his eyes. “I wasn’t correcting—you know what?” He shakes his head, resetting himself. “I did this wrong. I think you could use a hug. What do you say?”

“I don’t need a hug!” Nebula snarls. As she does, a tear falls down her cheek, down a line that separates the blue from the purple.

The defensiveness, the lashing-out… Jim’s heart squeezes. She reminds him so much of Tony, the way he never could accept comfort until he was past his breaking point, and even then only after a fight. Maybe that’s why Tony had taken such a shine to her, talking to her over the holograms whenever she was in range, drawing up an Avengers suit for her that he never offered.

“You sound like Tony,” he laughs. His eyes burn.

“...I do?”

Jim blinks away a few tears. When his vision clears, Nebula is wearing an expression Jim has never seen in person. That young, earnest look, he only ever spotted in the holograms over Tony’s shoulder, when Tony was doing his adoptive dad thing he always denied doing.

“Yeah. He always said he was fine, too. Except these last few years.”

He takes a deep breath. The fresh air of the woods, the life around them, beats back the emptiness for another moment, and another moment. That’s the only way to do it.

“These last few years, he’s gotten better at admitting when he’s hurting. 'Cause when you admit you’re hurting, that’s when you can start making your way to feeling better. And if you tell people that you’re hurting, they can help you.”

Jim swallows down the lump in his throat. “After he took on Peter, and then when Morgan came along… I know he wanted to be a good role model for them. So he started—he _finally_ started letting me help him before things went to hell.”

It’s too much, and the tears spill over. Jim is an ugly crier; one reason he tries not to cry around people. But none of it really matters when his best friend of over three decades, the brother he never had, is gone.

Jim sobs out the grief he hasn’t let come yet. The birds that had started singing since Nebula stopped kicking the tree go silent again. The only sound, other than him, is the breeze through the trees.

He’s got tissues in his pocket. He uses them all. His chest hurts like getting shot. His hips hurt like they know that the man who let them move again is gone.

Cold hands creep over his shoulders and press him against a cold body.

They sit like that for a long time. Eventually, Jim recovers enough to lean forward, breaking the embrace, so he can wipe off his face.

Nebula breaks the silence, her gravelly voice quiet. “He let me tend to his wounds, on the _Benatar_.”

“Good!” Jim's voice comes out too harshly, too full of bitterness and regret. But none of that is foreign to Nebula. She doesn't flinch.

They sit for longer. The sharpest stab of grief is still fading from Jim’s chest, leaving him tired and drained. Sitting seems like the right thing to do. He doesn’t know what Nebula is taking out of the sitting, the silence, the forest. He hopes it’s helping.

“I don’t… know what to do,” she says at last. “For most of my life I did what Thanos told me to do. Then, I only wanted to destroy him. There is no place for me with the Guardians.”

Jim takes a deep breath and puts his Avenger cap back on. “If you need something to do, I can help with that. Are you attached to space?”

“I’m not attached to anything.”

“Well… the Avengers have a whole world to protect again. And considering how many of us are retired, or too traumatized to fight, or… we could use some new blood that knows what they’re doing.”

“Are you…”

“Offering you a job? I guess I am. I already know you’re one of the best fighters we could have, and you have knowledge and experience about life beyond our solar system that we need.”

Nebula looks tired. “Yeah. Okay.”

Jim figures she’s agreeing because she doesn’t have any better offers, rather than that she really wants to be an Avenger. But that’s far from the worst reason she could have.

Right now it doesn’t feel like there’s much reason for anything, but they’ve still got to carry on. The world will always need defending.

Slowly, achingly, feeling every one of his years and more besides, Jim gets up. He stands under his own strength, supplemented by some of the most advanced medical engineering on the planet, and helped, to his surprise, by a cold blue hand on his elbow.

He looks at her in surprise, and Nebula meets his gaze head-on, the way she does everything.

“I’m hungry,” she says simply.

“I heard they’re cooking up burgers.”

They don’t say anything else, but Nebula walks at Jim's slow speed all the way back. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] If the Bough Breaks (Someone Will Catch You)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169457) by [sophinisba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba)




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